Nasima was 14 when she was sold into a brothel - now she is on a mission to ensure other survivors like her get the help they need

By Anuradha Nagaraj

GOBRA, India, Feb 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For more than a year, Nasima Gain did not leave her house. She spoke to no one, refused to meet friends and lay in bed.

Closeted in her room, the Indian teenager was consumed by guilt, blaming herself for being snatched from her village, taken to a neighbouring state and sex trafficked into a brothel.

She recalls the day of her abduction, aged just 14, vividly.

"I was dressed in a sari that day because we were celebrating (a festival)," she said at a relative's home.

"I think it was the first time I was wearing a sari and remember being very happy. That morning, I never imagined that I would be so terrified by night," she said from Gobra, a village of fewer than 500 families along the India-Bangladesh border.

Like tens of thousands of teenagers trafficked from the eastern state of West Bengal to brothels across India or into domestic servitude, Nasima was sold by one of her relatives.

"I trusted him," she said of a childhood friend who grew up to traffic her. "We had planned to spend the day out. He took that chance and trapped us."

Nasima and a friend were made to join a dance group then taken to a dance bar and sold for sex. She was beaten and abused for almost a year before a tipoff brought police to the rescue.

That was in 2010 and Nasima said she emerged an utter wreck.

Now she is on a mission to ensure others who escape human trafficking and modern slavery get the help that eluded her.

"Previously I stammered and had no confidence," she recalled. "Now I ... keep my head high."

Between April 2016 and December 2018, 500 million rupees ($7 million) was disbursed among 16,837 beneficiaries, the women and child development ministry told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

West Bengal, which reported the most trafficking cases in India in 2016, is one of the worst states when it comes to implementing the scheme, activists say.

They say few survivors get training, compensation is often slow and many lack protection, so risk being re-trafficked or abused by their own family.

For instance, just 75 survivors have received job training under a state scheme that began in 2015, according to data obtained by Kolkata-based advocate Vipan Kumar.

"If the government does not protect her, both physically and economically, then they are doing more harm," said Sarfaraz Ahmed Khan, an anti-trafficking academic, as family shame often drives a victim straight back to sex work.

In a rare verdict last June ordering authorities to pay a trafficking victim, the Calcutta High Court described delays in compensating survivors a "gross inhumanity".

Nasima understands such delays only too well.

The last hearing in Nasima's case was in January last year and since then she has been left waiting, angry and frustrated.

She hopes her legal fight will deliver a different outcome for women like her who need one basic thing - money - to turn life around.

"In remote villages like mine ... money silences all the talk and so if a survivor earns, the stigma fades automatically. Money is omnipotent, it helps to overcome all hurdles and that is why survivors have to get back on their feet quickly."

Between April 2016 and December 2018, 500 million rupees ($7 million) was disbursed among 16,837 beneficiaries, the women and child development ministry told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

West Bengal, which reported the most trafficking cases in India in 2016, is one of the worst states when it comes to implementing the scheme, activists say.

They say few survivors get training, compensation is often slow and many lack protection, so risk being re-trafficked or abused by their own family.

For instance, just 75 survivors have received job training under a state scheme that began in 2015, according to data obtained by Kolkata-based advocate Vipan Kumar.

"If the government does not protect her, both physically and economically, then they are doing more harm," said Sarfaraz Ahmed Khan, an anti-trafficking academic, as family shame often drives a victim straight back to sex work.

In a rare verdict last June ordering authorities to pay a trafficking victim, the Calcutta High Court described delays in compensating survivors a "gross inhumanity".

Nasima understands such delays only too well.

The last hearing in Nasima's case was in January last year and since then she has been left waiting, angry and frustrated.

She hopes her legal fight will deliver a different outcome for women like her who need one basic thing - money - to turn life around.

"In remote villages like mine ... money silences all the talk and so if a survivor earns, the stigma fades automatically. Money is omnipotent, it helps to overcome all hurdles and that is why survivors have to get back on their feet quickly."

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